question about finding literary magazines

I received the following question from a reader:

There are tons and tons of literary journals out there and most of them aren’t cheap. I imagine that your MFA program may have made many of these accessible to you. Even so, how did you sort through them and figure out which ones you might submit to and which not? And for those of us who lack that kind of access: Any suggestions on how to do so on a budget?

Thanks so much for this question.  Do you live near a bookstore with a good literary magazine section, by any chance?  There were some literary magazines available in the office of my MFA program, but I honestly spent more time looking through the magazines at Prairie Lights, the great indie bookstore in Iowa City.  They kept the latest issues of many literary journals, and sometimes I would just take a couple hours during a free afternoon or evening to look through some of them.

I also wrote this post earlier on the blog about how to find names of journals to submit work to:

http://justinkramon.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/where-to-submit-short-stories/

As far as how to sort through the journals, I find their websites really helpful in giving me an idea of what they’re looking for.  But the other thing I’d say is that I honestly don’t worry too much about it.  Often it takes a lot of submissions to place a story, and I think it can be very worthwhile to submit a story widely.  Magazines can surprise you, in my experience.  I might have an idea of the “type” of story they accept, and then an editor with a different vision can see a story and publish something completely uncharacteristic of the magazine.

My thought, for whatever it’s worth, is that the most important thing is to focus on the story itself, and making it as great as you’d like it to be.  After that, I’d submit widely to journals that you’d be happy to publish in and see what they say.  Sometimes they might simply tell you they’d be interested in seeing future work, and then you can put them at the top of the list for the next story you send out.  With online submissions, you can often submit for free, so it’s really just a matter of having the time to do it, which I know can be tough.  I just tried to build this time into my writing routine — maybe a couple hours a week to work on submissions.

I also keep a very detailed file of everywhere that I submit stories, when I submit, when I hear back, and what the response is.  It seems time-consuming at first, but once I was in the routine, it actually saved me a lot of time and was a good reference for later stories.

Is this helpful?  Please send follow-ups if there’s more I can offer.

Why I Love Alice Adams

Today’s post is a link to a piece I wrote about one of my favorite writers, the late Alice Adams, whose fiction provided such a strong example for me of the type of engaging and meaningful work I’ve always wanted to write.  My piece appeared originally on author Robin Antalek’s blog:

http://robinantalek.blogspot.com/2010/10/justin-kramon-author-of-finny.html

Radio interview

An interview about writing, humor, my MFA program, and some other subjects, aired on PBS radio’s The Roundtable this week:

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1700477

writing and being less of a man

Today’s post is an interview I did with the Albany Times Union in which I discuss why I’m less of a man than a lot of 20th-century American male writers:

http://www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Finny-Coming-of-age-and-then-some-646061.php

a question about marketing

Today’s post is an answer to a follow-up question from the previous post:

How much were you thinking about building a network of readers before Finny was accepted for publication? The conventional wisdom nowadays is that you always have to be thinking about marketing so you’ll eventually have something to put in your query letter. I see the wisdom in this from a marketing perspective, of course, but not from a writing perspective. What are your thoughts?

Again, I have to be honest here and say that I didn’t really think about marketing myself before I sold the book.  As you said, I’m not sure this was the best business decision, but I’m sure it was the best decision for my writing.  I really wanted to write the best book I could, and to me that meant writing the book I would want to read and trying to block everything else out.

One thing I’ve heard about nonfiction writing is that books are often sold on “a platform.” While at first I thought this meant they were passed down from a stage, I realized later that “platform” refers to an established audience, which can be achieved from writing articles or lecturing or running a popular blog or being an expert in some way.  My sense is that fiction is a little bit different from that, in that it’s hard to know what the audience is for a given book.  While this can make fiction a little harder to sell in some instances, I think it also frees fiction writers up from having to run around too much to sell themselves before they even sell the book.  But I’m sure that being a celebrity or running a popular blog or appearing on TV wouldn’t hurt when you’re trying to sell a novel, so I don’t mean to dissuade people from that if you have interest in it.

As far as my experience, I worked more on doing some writing-related things that I hoped would make me and my novel more appealing.  This included publishing stories in established journals, applying for fellowships and awards, and attending conferences and residencies.  I posted earlier this year about some things I did that I thought were helpful for my writer’s resume.

I hope some of this info is helpful.  Also, everyone should feel free to follow up with me about this issue, or ask me questions about any other issues I’ve discussed in other posts.  I’m always happy to offer my experiences and answer questions as well as I can.

time management

Today’s post is an answer to the following question I received from a reader:

How do you balance making time to write and taking time to read about the publishing industry? I find that hours of otherwise writing-worthy time can go into reading twitter entries, blog posts, conference summaries, etc. or writing questions in comment windows.

I have to be honest and say that I didn’t do a huge amount of reading about the publishing industry while I was writing my stories and novel, which turned out to be good for me, since a lot of what you read about publishing is discouraging, and I was doing my best to stay encouraged while I wrote.  But I definitely did some reading — about how to submit stories and novels, about the experiences of authors whose writing I love, and a little about craft.

For me, it was really important and helpful to say to myself at some point that writing was a priority — in other words, that I was going to get up every day and spend some amount of time on new work.  If it meant that that was all the writing time I had that day, then that was all I did.  But on an ideal day, I’d get some time in the morning to work on new writing, and some time later in the day to read about publishing, or listen to author interviews, or edit a story, or do some submissions, or even just read.  But if I only had a short amount of time, I wanted to give that time to writing.

One thing I realized over time was that no one was ever really going to give me time to write, and that I’d have to make that time myself.  It’s so hard to get up and write when you’re feeling discouraged about a piece — and a big part of the struggle for me is finding a way to keep going when I’m feeling like that.  At those moments, it’s easier, and sometimes helpful, to just google about writing or read a good book.  But my aim is always to find a way to get back to the writing and feel some hope about it.  I think the hope is the thing that gives me the time, actually.

Playing with Short Story Form

Some readers of my blog have sent questions about whether any of my short fiction appears online, so I wanted to post a link to a story that appeared in FiveChapters.com recently.  The story uses a traditional structure, but plays around with it.  As a writer, it’s been really helpful for me to take a lot of time to study conventional story and novel forms.  I feel like it teaches me a lot about readers’ expectations for a piece, which I can try to either meet or defy, depending on what I’m hoping to accomplish in that piece.

Here is the story:

http://www.fivechapters.com/2010/the-other-side-of-the-wall/

Have a great day.

FINNY music

Today’s post is a follow-up to a previous post about a music playlist I created to accompany FINNY.  Recently I wrote a piece for the LargeHeartedBoy site that included mp3′s of music that I composed and performed to capture the feelings of certain scenes or characters in FINNY.

If you’re interested in hearing the music, you can access the piece here.

update to plot post

I mentioned some concrete things I did to help me with plotting my novel in an earlier post.  After reading this post, writer Sierra Millman (http://www.sierraprasada.com) wrote me with a great observation about plot in movies which I wanted to share with everyone.  Sierra was interested in the idea of plot as “the interaction of what happens with what you’re expecting to happen,” and she pointed me to the following review of “Lost in Translation” by Roger Ebert:

“She wants to show two people lonely in vast foreign Tokyo and coming to the mutual realization that their lives are stuck. Perhaps what they’re looking for is the same thing I’ve heard we seek in marriage: A witness. Coppola wants to get that note right. There isn’t a viewer who doesn’t expect Bob Harris and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) to end up in love, or having sex, or whatever. We’ve met Charlotte’s husband John (Giovanni Ribisi). We expect him to return unexpectedly from his photo shoot and surprise them together. These expectations have been sculpted, one chip of Hollywood’s chisel after another, in tens of thousands of films. The last thing we expect is… what would probably actually happen. They share loneliness.”

I just thought this was a wonderful way to talk about the process of expectation and action in a movie, and wanted to thank Sierra for making this connection and sending it my way.

short video about writing

Today’s post is a video interview I did with Hello King Productions, where I talk about what I tried to do in my novel, and some of my thoughts about writing and my writing process.

You can watch the video here.

Have a great day.